Marketing On the Web Google has just updated their guidelines for websites. Website designers and webmasters should review these guidelines to insure your sites follow best practices. Among the changes are new recommendations for mobile sites and using https (secure http). Google Webmasters Guidelines Bing's guidelines have not been updated, but can be found here.
MoreFeedburner Subscription Problems
I use Google's feedburner product to manage my feed and email subscriptions. For email subscribers, it monitors the feed on my blog and emails subscribers when there is a new post. I'm not sure what the deal is, but recently it's been repeating emails, re-sending some posts that are months old. I appreciate my email subscribers and I am sorry know this is annoying! I think there are two choices here, either I kill the feedburner service entirely, or wait for Google to fix it. Killing feedburn...
MoreIt’s About Topics Not Keywords!
I am routinely asked about keywords and SEO. First let me say that meta keywords, have literally not been a ranking signal for more than 10 years. Yahoo was the last to major engine to use them and that ended when Yahoo started using Bing's as its search engine. Second, with Google's Hummingbird update, Google understands parts of speech, so it more important to cover a topic thoroughly than to have exact keyword phrases. If your still stuffing your pages with keywords and phrases, just stop! It...
MoreSpeaking at The Big Marketing Event
Speaking at the Big Marketing Event today. The event is sponsored by Women's Business Center of North Alabama. Presentation can be downloaded here: https://www.marketing-ontheweb.com/docs/motw-big-marketing-event-2015.pdf
MoreGoogle’s Mobile Update aka Mobilegeddon
Google announced that on April 21, 2015 it would start excluding websites that are not mobile friendly from its mobile search results. I have been alerting my customers to this change in Google's algorithm for several months. Sadly moving to a 'responsive' mobile friendly design is expensive and beyond the reach of many struggling business owners. The update has come and gone with seemingly little impact, but let me suggest what I think the long term impact will be. First this is a Google ...
MoreCurrent SEO Strategies
Google has really altered the Search Engine Optimization landscape in the past few years. Companies that went against Google's guidelines were either banned from the search results entirely or their products and services were moved way down search results into obscurity. This video from Rand Fishkin at MOZ does a really good job of highlighting current SEO strategies (or perhaps better, Search Engine Marketing strategies). Don't start the video and leave thinking you already know this stuff, he ...
MoreOptimize Your Pages for Topics, Not Phrases
Google released an update called Hummingbird in September of 2013. The update shifted the focus of SEO away from direct match phrases towards rich topical discussions. I suspect this was in part due to the shift in search volume to phones, and more specifically, Google's ability to search from voice requests. Google now understands parts of speech and that one question may relate to a previous question. As an example some might search "where is the Eiffel tower" and then follow with "how tall is...
MoreHTTPS Everywhere
Google has announced that https: (secure) connections are preferred and that sites using https: will enjoy a ranking advantage over http: (non-secure) sites. This video discusses some of the common pitfalls that occur when people switch.
More